“Kirsten, hi,” Natalie says softly when she opens her apartment door for me. “What are you doing here so early?”
“Take a guess,” I snap. I’m still shaking all over out of anger or fear or shock. I’m not sure which. After the asshole left, I checked my gun and found it empty. All the bullets were rolling around the drawer, which is why the son of a bitch wasn’t afraid I’d shoot him. Then, I went to the club and banged on the door until someone opened it and gave me my phone.
He wasn’t lying about sending me the videos either. Seeing them, I wanted to crawl into one of the piles of trash at the curb and never come out again.
“Bad night? I couldn’t find you when I was ready to leave the club, and you didn’t return my texts…”
I hold up my palm that trembles with the urge to slap her across her lying face. “Stop. Just stop playing dumb. You set me up, didn’t you? How fucking could you, Natalie?”
Her smile falls and her eyes lower. “You know?”
“I know!”
“I’m sorry. I just really needed the money, okay?”
“He paid you to set me up so he could blackmail me?” I grit out through my clenched teeth.
She nods.
“How much?” I ask. “How much did he pay you to literally help him fuck me over?”
“All together? About twenty-five thousand.”
“He paid you twenty-five thousand dollars? I guess that was money well spent, since he got exactly what he was after thanks to the video of me blowing him — a dismissal of the charges against him and his mobster friends!”
“Okay, I didn’t have any part in what you did with him,” Natalie huffs. “He just paid me to invite you to the club and then get you to come back. That’s it.”
“Oh, you’re just so fucking innocent, then, aren’t you?” I yell, not caring if I wake up her neighbors. “How do you even know that asshole?”
She shrugs. “Tristan and I met at the club one night. I didn’t know he had ulterior motives with me until he took me into one of those private rooms. He knew I worked in the DA’s office —”
“Oh my God.”
“Tristan worked me over for hours…” she trails off while biting her bottom lip as if recalling the pleasant memories.
I really don’t want to know the details, but one thing is clear. “You fucked him?”
“I guess it would be more accurate to say he fucked me, while I was in the stocks, after he spanked me for information about you and withheld orgasms.”
“Wow.” God, I feel so stupid, even more so. What did I think, that I was special? That the mobsterwantedto screw aroundwith me, and that getting the charges dropped was just a bonus? It was all an act. One he pulled on Natalie too.
“Am I going to get fired?” she whispers.
Can I legally fire her for luring me to a sex club where I willingly fooled around with a defendant who recorded it? Doubtful. Besides, do I really want her giving that statement to the unemployment office? Or have someone ask for proof of the video? Hell no.
“I’m not firing you, but you better stay the hell away from him. And me. If you pull anything like this again, I’ll get Bryan to charge you with drug possession. Then, if you try to tell anyone the truth about what happened, it’ll look like you’re lying to get out of them.”
She winces and nods. “I really am sorry, Kirsten.”
“He was in my apartment, in my bed naked when I woke up this morning, and I didn’t know how he got there!”
“Oh shit. Tristan promised me that he wouldn’t hurt you. He didn’t, did he?”
I want to say yes, but instead I scoff and spin around to leave.
Physically, he didn’t do anything to harm me. Emotionally? Psychologically? He very well may have broken me beyond repair because tomorrow, I have to go into the courthouse and do the one thing I swore to myself I’d never do — dismiss the cases against the biggest mobsters in the whole fucking city.
11
